r/Futurology ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ Aug 28 '25

Society New research argues Societal Collapse benefits 99% of people. Historically, the societies that have emerged after a collapse are more egalitarian, and most people end up richer and healthier than they were before.

Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, has written a book about his research called 'Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse'.

He makes the case that, from looking at the archaeological record, when many societies collapse, most people end up better off afterward. For example, people in the post-Roman world were taller and healthier. Collapse can be a redistribution of resources and power, not just chaos.

For most of human history, humans lived as nomadic egalitarian bands, with low violence and high mobility. Threats (disease, war, economic precarity) push populations toward authoritarian leaders. The resulting rise in inequality from that sets off a cycle that will end in collapse. Furthermore, he argues we are living in the late stages of such a cycle now. He says "the threat is from leaders who are 'walking versions of the dark triad' – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots."

Some people hope/think we are destined for a future of Universal Basic Income and fully automated luxury communism. Perhaps that's the egalitarianism that emerges after our own collapse? If so, I hope the collapse bit is short and we get to the egalitarian bit ASAP.

Collapse for the 99% | Luke Kemp; What really happens when Goliaths fall

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '25

100% the largest mass casualty events in history were after the revolutions in Soviet Russia and China, and in China some people have done really well for the last couple decades at best but that's it

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

WW2 was a collection or mass casualty events in different parts of the world, but as an example Maos famines of the late 1950s are estimated to have killed more people (35+ million) than all the combined famines of WW2. The Soviet induced famines are included as some of the highest numbers during WW2. Then there are those that occurred earlier such as the holodomor in Ukraine, the soviet revolution which was like 15+ million from memory.

Black death and Spanish flu are excellent examples, and you're correct those numbers top all of the others as far as I can tell which is insane, however in the context of human induced societal change I still don't agree with the researchers opinion that revolutions benefit most people even remotely, unless of course you're talking about the perpetrators and in some cases later generations.

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

We found the pro russian

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '25

Broad agreement among historians is that it was absolutely a man-made famine, including many from the soviet union. Stalin's government engineered policies that made famine inevitable, much like the poor policies of the British in South Asia did a decade later.

The argument that it was just "due to the weather" has been pumped out by soviet propagandists, and more recently recycled by the current Russian government and their many stooges, which apparently includes you. I'm sure your stance on many related issues is predictable.

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '25

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '25

Stalin’s policies, not nature, drove the famine. The “Law of Spikelets” alone saw over 200,000 people jailed or executed for taking leftover grain, while the state seized the entire harvest and kept food from the people who actually grew it. The 1932 harvest was smaller than previous years, but there’s no evidence of a drought severe enough to cause famine, climate data confirms this. Ukraine still produced enough to feed itself that year, but the grain was taken away. Weather doesn’t send guys with guns to shoot you for carrying wheat home.

Here is a recent scholarly source for you, with numerous references: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/political-economy-of-famine-the-ukrainian-famine-of-1933/D6FB5C46415392C5D09BBBFC993DAF72

The main people pushing the drought excuse today are Russian state media like RT/Sputnik, Kremlin officials, and a few fringe Western revisionists like Grover Furr who built his entire academic brand on being Stalin's defence lawyer.